So the brethren sat in the cold cloister reading their good books. The Benedictines, who were scholars and literary persons, provided by rule that these precious manuscript volumes should be handled with becoming care. “When the religious are engaged in reading in cloister or church, they shall if possible hold the books in their left hands, wrapped in the sleeve of their tunics, and resting on their knees.” Who were these men? Whence had they come? and why? As for their origin, they belonged, so far as we can now discover, to the same class from which the ministry is still mainly recruited: to the great company of those who are neither rich nor poor, who neither earn their living by their hands nor inherit the means of living from their fathers, represented in mediæval England by the gentry, as distinguished on the one side from the peasantry, and on the other side from the aristocracy. As for their motive, each had his own. “What are you here for, Bernard?”--the great saint of the Cistercians had the question written on his wall. _Ad quid venisti, Bernarde?_ To this inquiry the abbey might have returned as many as fifty different answers. Some of the white-gowned men came in pure love of God, deeming a life of continual prayer the most blessed of all lives, delighting in it [Illustration: _Fountains Abbey._ _From the South East._ _Photo. Watson._ _Art Repro. Co.] all, finding in the cloister the four-square city of God which is pictured in the Book of the Revelation. Some came from love of leisure, or of simple peace and quiet: the worse ones, disposed to be respectably idle; the better, finding the outer world too boisterous for their gentle souls. Some came because they were disappointed; some because they had failed; some because they had suddenly seen the emptiness of common life, the baseness of much of it, the flagrant evil of some of it, and had come out of it that they might live to a good purpose.